J. M. Robertson

“ A thesis which looks first and last to scientific truth is therefore not addressed to him. It is addressed to the more earnest of the laity and the clerisy—hardly to those indeed who hold, as an amiable curate once put it to me, that “in the providence of God” all heresy is short-lived; but to those who, caring for righteousness, do not on that score cast out the spirit of truth. Many such are honestly convinced that the teaching on which they have been taught to found their conceptions of goodness cannot be the accretion of a myth ”

“ The European who sees nothing in the fact that the mythic Krishna is loved by millions of Hindoos; that in ages of antiquity millions of worshippers were absorbed in the love of Dionysos, mutilated themselves [20] for Attis, and wept for Adonis, is not really ready for a verdict on what “must” have been as regards the building up of any cult. Are the Psalms, once more, a testimony to the historicity of Jehovah, or is the hymn of Hippolytos to Artemis, in Euripides, a proof of anything but that men can love an imagination? ”

“ The more instructed believers are as warm in their resentment of the latest and coolest negative criticism as were their fathers towards the contemptuous exposure of the contradictions of “inspiration.” Anger, it would seem, always leaps to the help of shaken confidence. Let the believer perpend.
It is not orthodoxy that is to-day fighting the case of the historicity of Jesus. Orthodoxy is committed to the miraculous, to Revelation, to the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and, if it would be consistent, to the Ascension, which is on the same plane of belief. ”

“ If we assume that Judaism had made its proselytes in the pagan world by reason of the appeal made by its monotheism to the more thoughtful minds, we are bound to infer that Christism was on that side rather at a disadvantage, inasmuch as it was really adding a new deity, with a “Holy Spirit” superadded, to the God of the Jews.
But the ordinary argument as to the vogue of “pure monotheism” at any time is in the main a series of traditional assumptions. For the more thoughtful of the ancients, polytheism was always tending to pass into monotheism. ”

“ Insofar, again, as the plea for “religion” is merely a plea for a word, or a thesis that all earnest conviction about life is religion, it is quite irrelevant to the present discussion. [224] The rationalists who feel they cannot face the world without the label of “religion” for their theory of the cosmos and of conduct will be in the same position whether they believe in a “historical Jesus” or not; and those who must have a humanist “liturgy” of some sort in place of the ecclesiastical are apparently not troubled by problems of historicity. ”

“ If the progressive analysis of the subject matter from the point of view of its historicity has meant a century and a half of debate and an immense special literature, it is not to be supposed that the theory which negates the fundamental assumptions of that literature can be fully developed and established in one lifetime, at the hands of a few writers. The problem “What really happened?” is in fact a far wider one for the advocate of the myth-theory than for the critic who undertakes to extract a biography from the documents. ”

“ To this day, orthodoxy has no rational account to give of the pervading doctrine of the New Testament as to the speedy end of the world. The biographical school finds in it a measure of support for its belief in a real Jesus, who shared the delusions of his age. But as that explanation equally applies to all men in the period, it gives the biographical view no standing as against the myth-theory. Christian prophets spoke for “the Lord” just as Jewish prophets did before them. ”

“ How long is it to be maintained that the secret or inspiration of good life lies in the ideas of men for whom the framing of false history was a pious occupation? The main ethical content of the Christian system, the moral doctrine by which the Church has lived down till the other day, is the ethic-defying doctrine of the redemption of mankind by a blood sacrifice—a survival of immemorial savagery. ”

“ Organization
Organization, which in our days has become “a word to conjure with,” is no new factor in human life. It is the secret of survival for communities and institutions; and the survival of Christism in its competition with other cults must be traced mainly to the early process of adaptation. That, however, takes place in terms of three concurrent factors: (1) the appeal made by the cult which is the ground of association; (2) the practice of the community as regards the relations of members; (3) the administration, as regards propaganda, expansion and co-ordination of groups. ”

“ Mark turned the story to the illustration of the doctrine laid down in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,36 that devils and wild beasts will flee from the righteous man; and Luke and Matthew turn it into an affirmation of the theological maxims of Jewish monotheism; but these are simply the invariable practices of the evangelists, steeped in the habits of thought of Jewish symbolism. The myth remains; and the story, as story, has counted for a great deal more in Christian popular lore than the theology. ”

“ In the religions of Adonis, Attis, Isis and Osiris, Dionysos, Mithra, and the Syrian Marnas (“the Lord, a variant of Adonis = Adonai, one of the Jews’ exoteric names for Yahweh”) , a resplendent ever-youthful God who had died to rise again was sacramentally adored, mourned for, and rejoiced over, by devotees just as absorbed in their faith as were the Jesuists. With vague pretences of biographical knowledge, to which nobody now attaches any credence, they were as sure of the historicity of their Vegetation-Gods and Sun-Gods as the Christists were of the actuality of theirs. ”

“ Thus the biographical school itself proffers a myth-theory, without indicating an explanatory motive for the positing of a contradiction. But when we realize that an acclamation of a quasi-king riding on an ass was actually part of the ritual in a sacrificial rite in which he was to be crucified, the two clashing elements in the legend are at once explained in the full myth-theory. Their separate handling and development was, just as intelligibly, part of the process of gospel-making, the creation of an ideal Jesus. ”

“ There is no more universal feature in religious history than the recession of the High Gods.24 The more “supreme” a deity becomes, in popular religion, the more generally does popular devotion tend to elicit Son-Gods or Goddesses who seem more likely to be “hearers and answerers of prayer.” Sacred Books certainly tend to check such a reversion; and in Islam the check has been successful in virtue of the very fact that Allah, like the early Yahweh, is in effect conceived as a racial God, or God of a single cult. But the tendency is seen at work all over the earth. ”

“ But while Peter is pretended to have accepted Gentilism, it is Paul who acts on the principle; and he it is who is first represented as fighting pagan polytheism, notably at Ephesus (xix, 26) . At Athens, in a plainly fictitious speech, he is made to expound the “unknown God” of an Athenian agnostic cult in terms of Jewish opposition to image-worship, indicating Jesus merely as “a man” raised by God from the dead to judge the world at the judgment day. It is after this episode that he is made to tell the Jews of Corinth he will “henceforth go unto the Gentiles.” ”

“ A multitude of those who acclaim the gospel Jesus as the supreme Teacher reveal themselves as below the standards of normal candour.
From such pretenders to moral authority, the seeker for truth turns to the layman similarly concerned, and to those professional scholars who are capable of debating without passion, and in good faith. Professor Schmiedel and M. Loisy are still, it is to be hoped, types of many. The problem is in the end, unalterably, one of historical science; and only by the use of all the methods of sound historical science will it ever be solved. ”

“ We thank thee, holy Father, for thy holy name, which thou hast caused to dwell in our hearts, and for the knowledge and faith and immortality which thou hast made known to us through Jesus thy servant; to thee be the glory forever. Thou, Sovereign44 Almighty, didst create all things for thy name’s sake; both food and drink thou didst give to men for enjoyment, that they might give thanks to thee; but to us thou hast graciously given spiritual food and drink and eternal life through thy servant. Before all things we thank thee that thou art mighty ”

“ That there “must” be a historic process of causation behind every cult is a truism: it does not in the least follow that the historic basis must be the historicity of the God or Demigod round whose name the cult centres.
Many Saviour names have been the centres of cults, in the ancient world as in the modern. There were extensive and long-lived worships of Herakles, Dionysos, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, in addition to the age-long cults of the “Supreme” Gods. Is it claimed that there “must” have been a historical Herakles, or Dionysos, or Adonis? ”

“ We are dealing not with a historic person or persons, but with an ancient cult, which Christian ignorance and Judaic “monotheism” between them strove to reduce somehow to a historical narrative, as the myths of Abraham and Samson and Israel and Elijah and a dozen others had been reduced, as the mythic ritual had been in the gospels, and as indeed the rituals of Paganism had been in the current pagan mythologies. There was no Samaritan Simon the Mage, who met a Christian Peter ”

“ M. Loisy is an illustrious New-Testament scholar: he is not a mythologist or a comparative hierologist. It is very likely that he would find it difficult to explain to himself those who invented Tezcatlipoca; but it would hardly follow that Tezcatlipoca was not invented. In point of fact, a large portion of M. Loisy’s own important critical performance consists precisely in explaining away as inventions a multitude of items in the gospel narrative. He can understand invention of many parts, and admits that unless removed they make an incongruous whole. ”

“ It is not here argued that the Messianic idea had been originally connected with the Jesus cult; on the contrary that cult is presented as a non-national one, surviving in parts of Palestine in connection with belief in an ancient deity and the practice of an ancient rite, in a different religious atmosphere from that of Messianism. The solution to which we shall find ourselves led is that at a certain stage the Messianic idea was grafted on the cultus; and this stage is likely to have begun after the fall of Jerusalem, when for most Jews the hope of a Maccabean recovery was buried. ”

“ The biographical school, in the mass, posit a human Teacher, round whose teaching a Messianic conception combined with a doctrine of salvation by blood sacrifice has nucleated. If in this tissue there cannot be inserted the historical detail of the trial before Pilate, there is nothing left but the quasi-mythical detail of the crucifixion as an ostensible historical basis for the Messianic and other teaching, so much of which is alien to the early cult, so much of which is critically to be assigned to previous and contemporary Jewish sources, and so much to later Jesuist editors and compilers. ”

“ In searching for the roots of a pre-Christian Jesus-cult in Palestine, we have noted the probability that it centred in a rite of twelve participants, with the “Anointed One,” the representative of the God, and anciently the actual victim, as celebrating priest. The Anointed One is “the Christ”; and the Christ, on the hypothesis, is Jesus Son of the Father. The twelve, as in the case of the early Jesus-cult at Ephesus, form as it were “the Church.” A body of twelve, then, who might term themselves “Brethren of the Lord,” may well have been one of the starting-points of Jewish Jesuism. ”

“ That there was an actual mystery-drama behind the gospel tragedy is revealed by the document itself, which is demonstrably not primarily a narrative at all, but a drama transcribed, with a minimum of necessary elucidation. Only the habit of reading with uncritical reverence can conceal from a student the dramatic bareness and brevity of the record in the synoptics—a record which in the fourth gospel is grafted, without any real development, on a protracted discourse that only artificially suggests circumstantial reality. ”

“ Our inquiry invites the attention only of those who, abandoning the supernaturalist basis of the Christian creed, seek to retain (it may be as the ground for a transformed “Christianity”) (1) the human personality which they believe to have underlain the admitted myths of the record, and (2) the teachings—or some of them—ascribed to the God-Man of the Gospels. The problem is one of historical criticism, and does not turn upon theism or atheism. The historicity of Jesus is maintained not only by “Christians” of various degrees of heterodoxy but by some professed rationalists ”